Chapter 7
Auntie Beverley's House
England was grey.
This was Marcus's first thought as the plane began its descent and he pressed his face to the small oval window. He had expected it to be different from Jamaica in the way that different countries were supposed to be different dramatically, unmistakably, in the way of photographs. And it was different. But what struck him most was the color. Or the absence of it. Grey sky, grey roads, grey buildings stacked up against grey horizon. Even the green, when there was green, looked tired.
He thought: Mama Vie's plants would not survive here.
Auntie Beverley was at the airport in a dark blue coat, holding a handwritten sign that said MARCUS as though he might not recognize her. She was taller than her photograph suggested a solid, upright woman with his mother's cheekbones and an expression that was warm but measured, as if she was already thinking about logistics.
"Look how big you get," she said, and pulled him into a hug that was firm and brief. "You must be hungry. I made rice."
She drove a small car with careful precision through roads that seemed impossibly narrow, past houses that looked like they had been arranged by someone with a great love of order and a limited color palette. Everything was in rows. Everything was measured. Marcus watched it all from the back seat with the alert, recording expression that Leroy had once described as his spy face.
The house was on a street called Elmwood Crescent in a place called Wolverhampton. It was a semi-detached house with a small garden in front and a kitchen that smelled of something sweet and complicated a mix of Auntie Beverley's cooking and a floral air freshener that would, over time, become the specific smell of this chapter of his life.
She showed him to his room. It was small but deliberate a single bed with a blue cover, a desk and a lamp, a shelf with a few books on it that she had put there thinking of him. He stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt the strangeness of things made for him by someone who had to guess what he was.
"You can change whatever you want," Beverley said from behind him. "It's your room now."
"It's good," Marcus said. "Thank you, Auntie Bev."
She put a hand on his shoulder. "Your mother raised you right. That I can already see."
After she left him to settle in, Marcus sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room. The window showed him a back garden, a fence, the backs of other houses. A sky that was the same grey it had been from the plane.
He thought about the mango tree.
He thought about Leroy.
He thought about his mother ironing at the factory on Spanish Town Road, seven time zones away.
Then he unpacked his suitcase, organized his things on the shelf, set the photograph of himself and Diane on the desk so it was the first thing he'd see in the morning, and made himself eat dinner.